Doug Gottlieb Jay Bilas Credit: ESPN
By Matt Yoder on

Doug Gottlieb may be focused on his duties as Wisconsin-Green Bay head coach after giving up his Fox Sports radio gig, but he can’t fully let go of the sports talk radio host within him.

After a year-and-a-half of trying to pull double duty as a DI coach and national radio host, Gottlieb stepped back from his radio duties in December. And in the course of doing so, his Green Bay Phoenix posted a greatly improved record in his second season on the sidelines. After going 4-28 in his first campaign, Green Bay went 18-15 this season although it wasn’t without some explosive moments from their head coach.

And Doug Gottlieb has continued to be outspoken about the sports media and people in it. And that includes his former ESPN colleague Jay Bilas.

In an interview with Jason Whitlock, Gottlieb decided to call out Bilas for what he perceived to be a hypocritical stance on the state of college basketball. The Green Bay coach believes Bilas is too negative about the state of college basketball and has benefitted personally from a system that he is advocating to destroy.

“He’s grown critical of the college game and it does feel like, Jay, if you don’t love this thing, why are you doing this? I think he’s been better this year, but I do think that he’s a brilliant guy but he’s just taken sort of a negative tone about our sport,” Gottlieb said.

“He doesn’t like the system that he helped create. He’s all been about player movement. He’s always been pro player, pro movement, pro free will. Basically he wants college basketball anarchy. He believes schools should be allowed to do whatever they want to do and that the NCAA’s bad and the system is bad.”

After that, Doug Gottlieb invited Jason Whitlock to say that Jay Bilas has built an entire professional career as a television analyst because he played at Duke. He used that to go even further at Bilas by saying the system that he has rallied against has benefitted him the most as a multi-millionaire television star. And he also called out Bilas’ colleagues in Jay Williams and Dick Vitale in benefitting from the success of the Blue Devils.

“The system that he says is rigged against players has made him a multi, multi, multi-millionaire ten times over. He actually is the beneficiary of what I believe true NIL is, which you go to a great school, you have a great career. He had a really good career for his ability. A great career. He played for a great coach and you forever benefit because of the school in which you went to. Everybody who works at ESPN has some sort of attachment with Duke. Jay does. Jay Williams does. Duke Vitale does,” Gottlieb remarked.

Yes, Jay Bilas may have gotten in the door at ESPN because he was a college star at Duke. But countless other college basketball players have had better careers than him as players. The reason why he has stuck around for years on television is because he’s great at television.

But furthermore, saying that Bilas became successful after his college basketball career because of Duke is a complete misunderstanding of what NIL is for from Doug Gottlieb. NIL is meant to compensate athletes while they are playing college sports because the NCAA was restricting their ability to make money that was not in existence for their peers. It has nothing to do with what happens after their playing days. Jay Bilas having a lengthy ESPN career has nothing to do with what he would have or could have earned while playing basketball at Duke.

How many of Gottlieb’s athletes at Wisconsin-Green Bay are going to become ESPN analysts? Do they not deserve to earn value based on all of the money and revenue their efforts are providing to their schools? Forget for a moment what Jay Bilas might say in response to these comments from Doug Gottlieb. What would his own players have to say about him trying to downplay the current benefits of NIL?

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